This is in conversation from Apple News. I'm Shemitabasu. Today, is the U.S. Constitution too hard to change?

Historian Jill Lepard has spent a lot of time studying and writing about the U.S. Constitution.

And she says there's one big problem with it, a problem that feeds many other issues with our politics right now.

We're not amending it enough. We have really abandoned the practice of convening to deliberate over fundamental law as citizens.

There's a vicious circle in which partisanship and polarization make amending the Constitution more difficult

and failing to amend the Constitution makes polarization and partisanship worse.

Jill has spent the past few years working on the Amendments Project,

a catalog that attempts to compile and classify every single attempt to revise the U.S. Constitution

from 1789 to present day.

And that process has yielded a fascinating archive of woulda-kudas throughout our nation's history.

If you look at all the failed attempts to amend the Constitution,

together they constitute kind of an incredible record

of the political yearnings of the American people.

Just because amendment is almost impossible to achieve

doesn't mean that what people propose is irrelevant, right?

Like it actually then becomes a kind of index of the popular will.

Jill is now out with a book called We the People, a history of the U.S. Constitution,

in which she makes the case that the modern unwillingness to amend the Constitution

underlies many of the challenges we're now facing.

Polarization, power struggles between the branches of government, and a deep sense of democratic fatigue.

And a quick note here that Jill and I spoke before the fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk

and the subsequent renewed conversations about free speech and First Amendment rights, so you won't

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